Dark Connections
by Lyrandar
Summary: A young mage with an interest in computer hacking winds up playing a larger role in the world than she expected, due to some unexpected consequences...


**Disclaimer:** I don't own MGLN, of course.

* * *

><p>I tapped my foot irritably as the line progressed at a glacial pace. Unsurprisingly, everyone and their little brother wanted to do the same thing I did, and they were apparently going about it much slower than I would, too.<p>

Not that that's particularly unusual. In many ways, I'm a fairly normal Midchildan teenager, but one of the ways in which I'm unusual is my higher than normal intelligence. Coupled with a serious lack of tolerance for idiocy or sloth, this means I spend most of my time in public mentally (and occasionally verbally) cursing out the people around me for their various failings. Other than that, I, Melody Carlson, am a perfectly normal young girl in this world: magic academy student, preparing for later career in public service, serious case of hero worship for famous Bureau mages, interested in more antique computer technology… okay, those last one or two might just be me. The latter, in particular, tended to distinguish me from my peers, since I would routinely cart around computer designs reminiscent of a century or two ago… of course, no one ever seemed to grasp the idea that current technology stuffed into a frame that large would result in a computer several times as powerful as any of theirs. No, most of my classmates just tease me about it… not that I particularly care about such idiocy.

I was here, at this event, mostly because I wanted to play with my magic a little. Not that we didn't get chances to practice in school, but I wanted to do something interesting. And when the TSAB decides to hold a public relations event and the military shows up in force with their various recruiting gimmicks, you can bet that there are going to be some interesting things to do. That's what brought me to this plaza near the old HQ for Section 6, and what made me decide to stand in this god-damned line…! Then I looked up and stopped daydreaming. Ah, I'm at the head now, so when she waves me forward…

This particular event was a mock qualification exam. I've taken qualification exams before, mostly as part of a placement test for my school. They're not quite the same thing as the mock combat offered in a military exam, though, even a watered down version like the ones they offer at this type of event. And the proctor – well, one of them – was the White Devil herself – Captain Nanoha Takamachi. Given that, there was no reason not to go for it – even if I was about to embarrass myself a little.

"So, what level do you want to try?" Nanoha asked me cheerfully.

As I considered the massive line behind me and the equally massive group that had already come through here, my first thought was something like: it defies belief that she can be this cheerful. Then my brain engaged. "Uh, B," I said, not quite as confidently as I was hoping for.

"Ah, going for a challenge?" she replied. "Ever tried something like this before?"

"Well, kind of…" I responded hesitantly.

"Oh?" she prompted me to continue.

"Well, at my school, they occasionally have us take the lower level exams… I mean, since a lot of us enlist in the military or emergency response teams… and even those that don't tend to be good enough for emergency assistance requests…" I cut myself off as I realized that was probably more than she really needed. And that I was taking up quite a bit of time myself. One of the benefits to having a low tolerance for stupidity is that I stop myself whenever I act like a fool… well, most times.

Luckily, Nanoha picked up before I had to make a fool of myself trying to move on. "And your rank?" she asked.

Knew this was coming. Oh well.

"D," I replied.

That bit earlier about me being smart? Doesn't necessarily mean I'm any good. In fact, only a healthy dose of sheer luck is responsible for me not being kicked out of my school for lack of talent. I can manage two or three big spells on a good day – while I've managed up to A rank defensive magic, that type of effort usually results in me falling unconscious no more than a few minutes afterward.

Predictably, Nanoha frowned. "Are you sure you want the B rank test?" she asked gently.

"Yes," I replied shortly. This was a waste of time. She wasn't going to convince me not to at least give it a try.

Nanoha appeared to realize the same thing, or at least decided that now was the wrong time. After staring at me for a long moment, she nodded and handed me a slip of paper. "We're sending the participants out in groups; please be at the landing pad at this time," she said.

I nodded, and replied with a simple thank you. I ignored the faint worry on Nanoha's face as I wandered off.

* * *

><p>About an hour later, I was standing by the helicopter landing pad. Apparently this mock qualification exam came with a free ride in a military helicopter - well, I doubt very many of the participants cared about that, even if it promised to be pretty interesting. I was, naturally, the first one there. This may have had something to do with the fact that I showed up nearly forty-five minutes early, right as the helicopter for the previous group was leaving, but I told myself I had nothing better to do anyway.<p>

About ten minutes after I arrived, I was staring out over the city when I heard someone coming up behind me… I guess I wasn't the only one with nothing to do. I turned to say hello to the newcomer…

"Ack! Nanoha…!" I don't know why I wasn't expecting her to show up, but given the (very obvious) surprise in my voice, I wasn't. Goddamnit.

"I'm sorry, did I startle you?" she asked, smiling.

"N-No, of course not," I replied, having (mostly) gathered my bearings.

"You're the one that wanted to take the B rank exam, right?" she continued.

"Yeah," I answered, more confidently. Then a thought struck me – did she say the 'one'? Like I was the _only_ one? "How many are there?" I asked.

"In this group? You," she confirmed. "There were one or two earlier today, but most people aren't going quite that far." She contemplated for a moment, then continued, "I believe most people are leaving it to the military enthusiasts who feel they have something to prove."

"If this is a lead-up to a lecture about pushing myself too far, you can just leave it," I said suspiciously.

Nanoha laughed. "Was it that obvious?"

I looked away. "Well, maybe I was being too suspicious..." I said hesitantly.

"No, that's more or less where I was hoping to end up eventually," Nanoha admitted. "I can understand you wanting to get the most out of a limited opportunity, so I'm not going to stop you, but please understand that this isn't really going to do you any good." She frowned a little, and continued seriously, "No one will think any less of you if you realize you've gone too far and back out, so please don't be afraid to do so if you can't continue…" She smiled and added kindly, "and please don't get hurt, okay?"

I nodded. "Got it," I replied. We waited in fairly companionable silence after that. As more people in my group arrived, Nanoha greeted each of them in turn. About thirty minutes later, a helicopter appeared in the distance, and Nanoha turned to address the whole group.

"All right, you all are going to take a mock C rank qualification exam, with one exception, right?" Nanoha asked, to general muttered assent from the five person group. "We're leaving now for a staging area in the abandoned portions of the city, near the ranges for the exams. If there's anything you need to have, you need to get it now…" I tuned out most of the rest of the brief to watch the approaching helicopter and think about how much trouble I'd decided to put myself in.

* * *

><p>Thirty minutes later (ten waiting for everyone to load up and twenty for the ride) we arrived at the staging area. It was the roof of an abandoned building in one of the older, now abandoned sections of the capital city. There were a few other civilians waiting for a ride back, and a few soldiers keeping an eye on things, but other than that it seemed rather unassuming.<p>

We'd been briefed on the way out about how the exams would work. We'd be taking them one after the other, but since Nanoha had taken off to monitor things from a separate location, we wouldn't really be able to watch any of the others taking their tests. I was going last; I would likely have to wait nearly forty-five minutes for my test. I spent most of the time agonizing about the test itself, of course. I would have to make my way from this roof to another building nearly a quarter mile away, clear all the targets out of that building, then go another quarter mile along a nearby road to the finish line. With a time limit, of course – fifteen minutes. This pretty much presented me with a choice between rationing my spells, and not moving quickly enough, or using as much power as I needed, and barely lasting five minutes, never mind fifteen. If nothing else, I shouldn't need much power to smash the various targets or to defend myself – Nanoha said that the concession they made for us civilians was turning down the shield and weapon power levels quite a bit. I suspected that the test was also shorter and less complicated, but hadn't bothered asking for confirmation. Even with that, finding and getting to everything in a fifty-story building within the time limit would be… well, any inspiration on how to manage that didn't seem to be forthcoming.

I did spend some time watching what bits and pieces of the other tests I could see, too. That was little more than flashes of light, broken glass, and occasionally broken stonework issuing from some building or other near the staging area, though. I'd mostly ignored the brief on the C rank test, so I wasn't entirely sure what made their test different from mine, although the shorter time limit (ten minutes) if nothing else seemed to imply that there should be less to do. Most of the others seemed to have no major problems, so I guess either it was easier or everyone was better than me. Probably both.

Finally it was my turn, and Nanoha's image addressed me. "Are you ready, Melody?"

"A moment," I replied, as I put on a headset and plugged it into my personal computer. "Midnight Dawn, Device Mode, engage!" I ordered, and was promptly surrounded by a burst of cobalt light.

My Storage Device is also a tablet computer. It's rather archaic, since in this day and age the same functions can and are built into just about every object imaginable, but as I said, I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to computers. Of course, this also means having a device whose standby and activated modes are identical, since I want to be able to use it the same way whether I have the magic control functions activated or not, but that's beside the point. I have an alternate form if I want my device to look more significant, anyway. My Barrier Jacket is also very unassuming; just a dark blue sleeveless shirt and long skirt. Well, if nothing else, I don't have to spend a lot of energy to maintain a particularly powerful inactive defense or interesting device mode…

All of this only took a couple heartbeats, of course. I dumped my tablet into its little holster on my belt and replied.

"Now I'm ready."

"All right then, we'll begin shortly," Nanoha replied. Her face was replaced by a short countdown.

I tensed… and charged forward as "Begin" flashed on the display. I hit the edge of the roof running and jumped into open space.

I have cast flight spells before, too. My full power Black Wings spell is one of those which will knock me senseless sooner as opposed to later, though. Since I have this slight desire not to splatter myself over hard ground, most of the time, I try to limit my use of that one. To take its place, I developed a variant which uses a lot less power. Of course, Azure Wing is more like a glider than an actual flight spell, but you can't have everything. At least the building we started from was higher up than the target building, so I would have at least some speed when I got over there. My primary worry was that my lack of maneuverability would become a problem when I got within weapons range of the top levels of the target building – and it certainly seemed like I'd have plenty of time to worry about it.

A small eternity later (probably about a minute or two of real time), those fears were confirmed, as a sporadic shower of bolts started issuing out of the top five or so levels of the building. I didn't really have much choice.

"_Protection!_" I cast the standard defensive spell. With the effort I was putting into it, it might take a direct hit. Maybe. Luckily, what little evasive maneuvers I could manage seemed to be enough to reduce everything to glancing blows, which the shield easily deflected. I reached the roof in another few moments, and prepared to land…

At which point I realized one of those streams of energy had come from the roof, right as I pulled up sharply to kill my forward velocity, turning myself into a perfect target. The little sphere aimed at me once more, and I frantically shoved more energy into the Protection spell.

About three things happened at once. The damn thing fired, of course, catching me squarely. My shield shattered… thankfully after it absorbed the attack, rather than before. And I canceled the flight spell, and landed on the roof in a crouch, facing the target.

"_Nightfall!_" Pretty pretentious name for a straight line energy bolt with pathetic attack power, but I don't really care. The navy blue shot took the target out, and that's what matters.

Well, that and the fact that I was now feeling like I'd run a mile or two. That was more power than I'd intended to use thus far. I still had plenty left, but I was going to have to use a bit less than I'd planned for the remainder.

"Dawn, Partisan Mode, please."

A rod-like attachment on my computer, which would have been a wireless signal booster in another age, materialized in my hand, then lengthened into a long staff capped by a six-inch blade of blue energy.

I contemplated the problem of doing this quickly, to minimize my device energy use, while at the same time having less energy for searching for targets and defending myself, then decided that I'd never really thought this was possible anyway. Time to see how far I could get, and whether I could come up with a new plan before it was too late.

A moment later, I was taking stairs two at a time as I got started actually clearing the building. Luckily, I knew there were targets on the top few floors at least, since several of them had been shooting at me a few moments ago. I went through them fast. I'm not actually particularly athletic, or very good with the melee weapon form of my device, but the targets were far enough apart that all I really needed to concern myself with was getting close enough for one good shot, instead of worrying about multiple opponents. That was not easy, but I somehow managed to avoid taking any more than some light, glancing blows, easily deflected. Of course, all this running around wasn't making me any less tired.

Around the forty-fourth floor of the building, I pulled out the next trick I'd come up with to make up for my limited skills. I have cast… well, I guess by now I'll just say I've tried most forms of magic used by modern mages; in this case I was going to use my low-power answer to a search spell, Dawn Reflections. A white pulse blasted outward, vanishing through the walls – a very simple scan which would tell me whether any sources of magic existed in a ten meter circle around me. Given that anything important to the test used magic, if only to communicate with the testing system, it seemed a safe bet that a negative response meant I could skip this floor to save time. Which is exactly what I did for that floor, as well as the next two.

At the forty-first, though, I got a positive response. So, once again, I recklessly charged out to smash whatever I needed to, and again it worked surprisingly well. I didn't exactly like it, since I prefer to plan and proceed carefully, but between the necessities imposed by the situation and the fact that it had worked thus far, I couldn't really complain too much.

The first hiccup showed up two floors down, though. Apparently they'd placed targets within range of the stairs on some floors, a fact I learned when my auto-guard routine activated when I reached the landing. The resulting Protection spell easily absorbed the shot, but that's because I have it set to use the highest power level I can manage. I salvaged the situation by diverting some of the power to a Nightfall blast aimed at the offending target, but it was still far more power than I'd wanted to use at pretty much any point. Time to come up with that new plan.

I sat down heavily against the wall of the landing and checked the time – five minutes elapsed, ten remaining. "Dawn, warn me at eight remaining?" I asked tiredly, to an answering ping from my headphones.

The problem was I really didn't have very many good ideas. As much as trying to do this without magic might be amusing, I didn't think it'd actually work. And I didn't have enough magic to finish the remaining four-fifths of the building – I might manage to maintain the current mode of my device that long, but that would be challenging even without spending energy on the light defensive spells which I'd needed so far. So if the remaining targets would obligingly not shoot at me while I walked up to them and smashed them, this might work. Right, because that's actually going to happen.

Wait. Sarcasm aside… that might actually be possible.

It's not just old computers I'm interested in; I find computer technology in general fascinating. Along with that comes an interest in computer security, and a fair bit of skill with hacking. Actually attempting to hack the testing system inside the nine or so minutes remaining probably qualified as impossible, but it's not like I had a whole lot to lose at this point. I supposed it wasn't quite how they intended me to use my magic, but again, I had little reason to care.

I put my partisan aside for the moment – I didn't want to shut it down completely, since I might not have enough energy to restart it, but I did put it in a sort of standby. I hammered a couple buttons on Dawn's screen and was staring at a list of communicating devices a quick moment and a tiny amount of energy later.

Searching for anything around it that's talking is part of the normal function of any wireless computer, after all. It didn't take a whole lot of extra energy to pinpoint a real location for those points. A moment later, I put my head in my hands as I finished thinking that through. I should have been searching for everything this way from the beginning.

Still, I didn't have that much time to waste on recriminations. Dawn picked out the closest target for me, two floors down, and I picked up my partisan and started walking down the stairs as I considered what I would do to it.

* * *

><p>Meanwhile…<p>

"I can't believe you're actually allowing this, Nanoha," Teana Lanster grumbled.

"Now, now," Nanoha replied. "She probably doesn't get all that many chances to try something like this." She considered the data before her. "She's actually doing fairly well, so far."

"I don't think that's going to last," Teana said warily. "She looks like she's burnt herself out to get this far… you're not really supposed to need to sit down and take a break."

"That was less than a minute, and she's moving again now," Nanoha protested, gesturing at the screen showing … standing next to a door in the building.

"The target in the next room-"

Tea and Nanoha's debate was interrupted by Raising Heart. "There is an abnormality in the testing system," she reported.

Both their gazes flashed to the screen where Raising Heart had put up an error message. Nanoha immediately asked, "Abnormality? What do you-?"

She cut herself off as more events unfolded on the other screen. Melody charged straight through the door towards the target… and it stubbornly refused to fire, even as she approached and sliced it in half with a massive sweep.

"A glitch?" Teana asked, sharply glaring at the error.

"Unknown," Raising Heart replied. "The target in question reported a possible civilian target and refused to fire. It failed to acknowledge my dismissal of the error message or a direct override command before its destruction."

"That's strange…" Nanoha said worriedly.

* * *

><p>I grinned widely as I ran down the stairs towards the next target. It had worked.<p>

A military system such as this isn't really supposed to accept communications from just anything, which tends to make it hard to hack into. Not that there aren't some ways, but most require more in-depth knowledge and preparation than I had available to me. So I hadn't bothered. Simply forcing the little thing's receiver to process dozens of incoming messages, even just to drop them all, could work to distract it… well, again, it was a military system, so self-defense and attack automatically overrode any other demands on its tiny little computer brain. But when I add another little detail… some situations require input from an automated device's guiding intelligence, in order to prevent illegal or immoral actions such as firing on civilians from occurring inadvertently. So if it needs that input from the comm system, then it has to clear away the crap I'm flooding it with, and I have my workable plan… Well, I'd probably need to use a simple spell to speed up my computer a little bit and increase the number of messages it sends. Even with the power advantage my tablet has over most other computers, trying to completely flood the system with only one device and no magic would be rather difficult.

Of course, there are some militaries, in stories and in history, who would basically say "screw caution, fire anyway", in which case this plan wouldn't work at all. Luckily for my plan, the TSAB is not that type of organization.

Even without that problem, it wasn't perfect by any means. I had to use my Twilight Shadow spell, for one thing – an illusion spell specifically designed to fool the digital image processing used by most computers. Arguably, this is a feature, as most intelligences filter out the flickers it creates. The problem, of course, is that it's not a whole lot cheaper, energy-wise, than a full-blown silhouette – I was lucky that the targets were apparently fairly generous with their emergency protocols, since it limited the time I needed to hold the illusion. For that matter, Nanoha and Raising Heart could probably get an override message through my spam eventually, if I was too slow about destroying the target.

So far, though, that hadn't happened, and I was pretty sure this was slightly cheaper than the bursts of defensive magic I'd been using. On top of that, there was much less risk of catching a direct hit or two and having to spend way too much energy. So I was feeling pretty confident as I shouldered my partisan and went off to finish this little test.

* * *

><p>"Let's see, every single target has reported the same error, right about when she gets within a couple meters of it," Teana said dryly. "Each target then refuses to fire, even as she walks up to it and destroys it. This really isn't a hard puzzle to solve – she's probably using some type of spell to generate the error. What I don't understand is why the targets aren't responding to our instructions overriding the error."<p>

Nanoha nodded. "Raising Heart's been trying, but there appears to be some type of communications problem along with the false sensor reading. At least, that's what seems to be the case…" She frowned with worry. "I just get the feeling there's something else going on here that we're missing… Using magic to exert such fine control of a system like this is not as easy as it sounds."

Teana shrugged. "If nothing else, it's going to be harder with this last group on the twenty-fifth floor balcony, unless this trick of hers works on multiple targets. I guess we'll see what happens then."

* * *

><p>Another fifteen or so floors later, I was standing, almost completely wiped out, outside an external doorway, belatedly realizing that I was in more trouble than I thought. There was pretty much no way my trick would work on multiple targets.<p>

The illusion would generate the necessary error in any target that could see it, but I had no idea how much comm junk was enough to block the devices. It barely even mattered, really – even if one-third of Dawn's output capacity was enough, there was no way I could destroy all three targets hovering around the balcony before the testing system's overrides got through to at least one. Granted, I had no idea how long I'd actually have, but I also had little interest in finding out the hard way. That also assumed that one-third was even enough, which seemed extraordinarily unlikely. This also meant I had about a minute to come up with a new idea, or four to six if the new idea involved teleporting to the finish line after destroying these three. Then a thought struck me.

"Dawn, do you have records of Raising Heart's previous messages to the other targets? And the sender's identification from those messages?"

This wasn't a good plan. Actually, it was a downright stupid one. The most obvious way to prevent the testing system and Raising Heart from overriding my illusion-generated error was to attack the testing system's core, or at least attack the link between it and the targets. And the messages I had, despite being encrypted, still had some routing information visible to me. I could use that to send something nasty to the sender's address I could see. The problem was, I had almost no idea what that sender's address represented.

"Dawn, launch an intensive scan on that address please." I leaned against the wall and considered the problem. Most likely, we were close enough that the testing system core could communicate directly with everything else, without using intermediate links. That meant that address would correspond to that main program. Raising Heart was probably running that main program as a subroutine… depending on which systems she was running it on and what parts of Raising Heart's system it had access to, attempting to attack it might constitute an attack on Raising Heart. Even leaving aside the fact that effectively attacking the proctor would violate the test rules, any attempt to do so would fail disastrously. AI systems like Raising Heart generally are not computer security experts, but they do have a certain awareness of their own system and what is or might be affecting it, in much the same way that a human notices when you hurt them. And they react to such problems far faster than any human hacker can, giving them the advantage. As usual, there are ways for a human to even the playing field… and of course, none of them are available to me right now.

If I was lucky though… Dawn pinged and the results flashed up on her screen. I paged through the details, and quickly managed to find some of the details about the hardware and operating system… neither of which corresponded to the typical Midchildan intelligent device systems. So, I had gotten lucky – Raising Heart was controlling a separate system, rather than running the whole thing with her own system. Now I just had to figure out what to do to this little toy… I started searching the net for any references I could find, hoping I'd get lucky again…

* * *

><p>"Caution, erroneous messages detected in the testing system!" Raising Heart reported urgently.<p>

"What now?" Teana and Nanoha asked simultaneously, one exasperated, the other worried.

"The main programs are reporting a large number of invalid or unexpected messages," Raising Heart replied. "Purpose unknown… Searching for-" Suddenly red lights flashed, and Raising Heart cut herself off. "_Alert!_

* * *

><p>I hit the last key, then tensed, waiting for my program to report a success. It turns out that this type of testing system is designed to accept commands from a remote connection or from a direct link, according to the entries I'd found online. And my earlier scan had noted that the system was apparently listening for a remote connection.<p>

I have no idea why, since the fact that it was listening also meant it wasn't currently using the remote connection; Raising Heart presumably was using a direct link. Which meant that the only purpose that listening program could serve was screwing things up, since even a legitimate attempt to exert control through it would interfere with Raising Heart. Not that I'm surprised; there is an unfortunate trend among Midchildan designers and users to depend on magic-based overrides or our nearly-unhackable AIs as opposed to depending on actual good computer security. It is apparently much easier to just cast a spell to jam communications or purge a device than it is to go back over your programs and ensure someone can't break them.

Not that I was complaining, since this listening program meant I should be able to spam fake connection requests until the system was so busy denying them that it had no time for anything else… including sending overrides. Heck, I should be able to connect to that through the net, which means I could even remotely log into my home computers and have them help out too. Probably overkill, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Just then, Dawn beeped to alert me that the testing system was no longer sending any replies to my computers' fake requests, and I cast my illusion and charged onto the balcony, partisan held high…

* * *

><p>"The testing system subroutine is being overlo-!" Raising Heart reported even more urgently. Just as abruptly, all the screens went dark. "… has crashed," she amended. "Restarting now…!"<p>

* * *

><p>I was barely a step onto the balcony when all three targets' shields dropped as they deactivated. I wasn't really expecting to crash the whole system, but I certainly wasn't about to question my good fortune, and I charged forward even more eagerly. My partisan flashed, taking out the nearest target, and I proceeded towards the next with only a slight pause.<p>

At that moment, both of the remaining targets reactivated – and immediately demonstrated that the process had cleared any errors as they fired.

Luckily, both missed as I practically bounced myself off the exterior wall of the building. Even so, at this point, I learned just how much of an error I had made… the suddenly full-powered energy blasts smashed a good third of the balcony into rubble. Apparently one of the other things I had managed with my shutdown was to remove the safety features they'd added for us civilians. Even with that little problem, the training drone probably couldn't kill me… but getting shot off the balcony was going to hurt a lot more, and the bit about not killing me did assume that someone would catch me before my unconscious body landed on the pavement below.

All this was running through my head as I took advantage of my forward momentum and took a wild swing at the second closest drone. Its shield nearly rejected the blow, but I managed to knock it into the balcony railing, and that finished the job. Of course, it also brought me badly out of position to make any further progress towards the last drone…

I probably should be worried more about getting away right now, since in a couple moments they're probably going to end the test and it's not going to matter. Even if I wanted to, though, the door behind me was now unusable on account of the destroyed balcony, and I'd have to go through the last drone to get to the other door. And even if I had the energy for Black Wings, it simply wouldn't get me far enough. So I might as well break this last one, too… I charged, praying that I'd be able to dodge long enough to destroy it.

As the target swiveled and took aim on me, I had a couple moments to realize that I would not be nearly that lucky. Then its weapon spat a bright flash.


End file.
